Lighting and Production Design

From a Black Sky

+LIGHTING

The Street Theatre 2013

A chamber opera set during the 2003 Canberra bushfires, From a Black Sky placed the orchestra in the heart of the stage allowing the action to revolve around it.

Black Sky's lighting design used a colour palette with acidic tones to move from the monotonous heat of a summer day, through a swirling maelstrom of fire and into a formless smokey aftermath. Colour-wrapped fluorescent tubes were used to represent fire in a new way onstage, echoing both the office-lighting of local government and radiant heat sources.

Judith Dodsworth, Rachel Duncan, David Rogers-Smith, and Don Bemrose in From A Black Sky composed by Sandra France, libretto by Helen Nourse